She was thinking and thinking of it that night.
“All right!” she said, bitterly. “I won’t deny it! I’m common! I’m not happy here. I don’t belong here. I don’t appreciate it. I hate it! I wouldn’t be like Miss Amy for anything.... Of course he’d soon see that. He’d find out that I’m—common....”
But she couldn’t bear the thought. She sat up in bed.
“Oh, but I haven’t had a chance!” she cried. “I’ve never had a chance! Oh!... If I could just see him alone, I could show him that I’m....”
She could not explain to herself just what she knew herself to be, just what it was that she wished this young man to know. It was that pitiful secret thought of all human beings, whether a fallacy or a profound truth can never be demonstrated—the thought that if you know me, you will love me, that if you hold a poor opinion of me, it is because you misunderstand me.
Perhaps after all she would go, just this once, just see him, and trust to his comprehension....
She waked up the next morning, still undecided, her heart as heavy as lead. She dressed in the dismal twilight of her little cell, weighing and deliberating, hesitating miserably. At last it resolved itself into this bald alternative—which way would cause her the least pain—not to meet him, to lose him forever now, at the very beginning, to destroy this promise of the first interest any man had yet shown in her—or to let it go on, to let her starved and ardent affection rush out to him, to become fatally entangled in the web of her own making, only to have him find her out and despise her?
She went into the kitchen to get ready the breakfast, and in there, a back room looking out over little yards, the sun was beginning to enter. She could see a soft blue morning sky, with shadowy white clouds blown across it by a mild and steady wind. It cheered her marvellously. She was as easily made happy as she was easily hurt.
She started to grind the coffee, in itself a cheerful morning noise.
“Oh, nonsense!” she said to herself. “I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. Of course I’ll go and meet him. Why shouldn’t I? It’s just a lark. It won’t lead to anything, if I don’t want it to. There’s no need for me to be so serious about it. I’m going!”